Silly bunnies and other fluff

April 2007

I had hamster's on my mind today because I have a freelance job designing a hamster (not this one) for an animated show and when I was on break I sketched this one for fun, decided to clean it up , so here's another demo of favorite animation/drawing app, TVPaint.

[click any image to see it larger]

Next I drop out the blue underdrawing and this is the finalclean up image on TVPaint , ready to be colored :

I've also been playing around with a freeware app called DELINEATE , which auto-traces bitmap images to vector (SVG) which can them be opened up in Illustrator for further work as an Illustrator file (and thence imported to Flash). I'm having pretty good results from DELINEATE as shown in the next two images, showing the drawing above (from TVPaint) vectorized by DELINEATE and then opened in Illustrator.

Someone asked about how to get "smooth" clean up lines using an application like TVPaint . I answered with a little tutorial made from a quick rough sketch of a cartoony cat's head . This was done on the Cintiq tablet .

I usually start with a "rough" blue pencil from the Sketch Panel , then on a
new layer I ink the clean up lines in black . I make sure to take advantage of
the rotating "virtual animation disc" in TVPaint to rotate the drawing
to the best angle for laying down the clean up lines smoothly and I use
the zoom-in control to get closer in on the part of the drawing I am working on. (see the second image) .

Finish the black line clean up over top of the blue line underdrawing:

Then drop out the blue line to leave just the clean black lines.

You then have the option of coloring some of the lines a different
color from black if you want to by using the Add function in the pen
tool . Then add fill color. I've done this one in black & white
because it felt sort of like a 30's character with the dot eyes and the
pie-cut highlights in the eyes . Not the greatest drawing in the world
, but it gives you the idea of what can be accomplished in terms of
"smooth" line quality .

One of my favorite bands is Pink Martini. They've been around for a while, but haven't put out too many CD albums . Their two CD's "Sympathique" and "Hang On Little Tomato" are soon to be joined by a new , long awaited CD , "Hey, Eugene". Check 'em out .